Catherine Manathunga
Biographic Data
| ID | 358296 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Catherine Manathunga |
| GIVEN NAMES | Catherine |
| FAMILY NAME | Manathunga |
| SIGNATURE | MANATHUNGA C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Sunshine Coast |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8915-0344 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
“Nobody talks to me in school”: A Standpoint Theory Exploration of Teachers’ Experiences of Isolation in Australian Schools
Despite the cultural and linguistic diversity in the Australian population, Australia’s teaching profession remains largely monocultural and monolingual, and the lived experiences of the small number of culturally, linguistically and/or racially diverse (CLRD) teachers working in Australian schools remain under-researched. This article presents the findings of a pilot study, which included a qualitative survey and interviews with teachers who ide…
Schools as inclusive workplaces: Understanding the needs of a diverse teaching workforce in Australian schools
This paper draws together academic and policy literature around the value of a culturally, linguistically and racially diverse (CLRD) teacher workforce in Australia. While Australia’s population is becoming more diverse, the teaching population is significantly less so, with far fewer teachers born overseas and/or speaking a language other than English at home. This paper seeks to address some reasons for this lack of diversity, and the lived exp…
Indigenous Doctoral Education Policies in the Global South: Postcolonial Policy Borrowing in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and South Africa
While decolonising education policy has attracted much rhetoric, consistent if slow policy change in doctoral education has been evident in the Global South. In former settler/invader colonies, a commitment to social justice necessarily involves addressing the ongoing wrongs of colonisation, with a special focus on changing the conditions of doctoral education for Indigenous peoples. This paper traces policy developments for Māori doctoral studen…
First Nations and transcultural counter-imaginaries in doctoral education
Forgetting culturally diverse equity groups in Australian doctoral policy: What Happens When Population Parity Is Reached
Population parity figures keep governments and universities accountable in ensuring that equity groups have access to higher education. However, what happens once population parity is reached? This paper explores Australian doctoral education policy on culturally and linguistically diverse (transcultural) domestic candidates. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, we suggest that an overwhelming focus on counting avoids addressing vital epistemolo…
Community linguascapes and epistemic linguascapes: Making a case for multilingual doctoral education in Australia
The privileging of academic English in research bypasses important issues regarding multilingualism in doctoral education. In Australia, the current monolingual research paradigm limits the scope and nature of the research evidence that informs policymaking, neglecting the experiences, contributions and needs of the First Nations and migrant communities. This paper reviews the existing rationales for engaging with issues of multilingualism in doc…
Australia's policy discourse of culturally and linguistically diverse teachers
Recruitment of more culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) teachers is considered a strategy to address the current national teacher shortage and increasing community diversity in Australia. However, the success of this strategy is cast into uncertainty when considering the historical underrepresentation of CALD school leaders and teachers in Australia. We approach this issue through policy analysis and examine two questions: How are CALD t…
Structural Power Dynamics in Polycentric Water Governance Networks
Water security is severely threatened by climate change. Building resilient catchments is key to reduce water insecurity, yet power dynamics that generate ineffective governance responses can hinder such resilience building. This research uses an Australian water governance process to study the power dynamics that underpin polycentric governance networks. Combining network theory and Lukes' structural power concept is a novel methodology tested f…
Understanding the complex power dynamics that shape collaboration and social learning in multi-stakeholder water governance
The relationship between power dynamics and decision making in natural resource management is central to explaining governance outcomes. Contemporary catchment governance is increasingly characterized by the interaction of multiple stakeholder groups, which has shifted processes like collaboration and social learning into the focus of water governance research and related fields. Because collaboration and social learning are effective tools for r…
Walking/Writing, Sensing Side-By-Side: A Decolonial Inquiry
‘Histories of knowledges’ for research education
The world faces complex and entangled environmental, health and social problems that can only be effectively grappled with if the research sector harnesses the knowledges and understandings of diverse cultures. Research education is a key site where more democratic and equitable processes of knowledge creation can take place. Drawing on de Sousa Santos’ argument for epistemic justice, this article discusses research education as embedded in globa…
Using Chinese and First Nations philosophies about time and history to reimagine transcultural doctoral education
Transcultural doctoral education has become a space to create opportunities for candidates to construct transcultural knowledge from the Global South. Rancière’s ideas about the ignorant schoolmaster and the role of dissensus have created cosmopolitan pedagogies in doctoral education. However, the role of history in transcultural doctoral education remains unexplored and draws principally on Western theorists. This article explores Chinese and Fi…
Listen with your heart: Auto-ethnographic reflection on the Wandiny creative gathering
The Wandiny creative gathering of Indigenous and non-Indigenous poets, artists, Elders, and participants across Australia actively sought to foreground First Nations voices, stories, poetry, art, and ontology. This paper presents the auto-ethnographic reflections from the event organisers, demonstrating that participation in a gathering that honours Eldership and Country is a profoundly personal and spiritual experience. Following a call-and-resp…
Collective, Vulnerable, Nascent (Post) Qualitative Inquiry-Writing
As a group of multidisciplinary postgraduate research students and teachers emerging as a “we,” we read, discussed, and then, without planning to do so, responded in writing to the textual provocations of three post qualitative texts. We picture ourselves as a “classing,” a “becoming class” (Meirieu, 2020, para. 1.). We are a study-group-thinking-writing experimentation; vulnerable, wobbling and joyously grappling to (re)shape (our) post qualitat…
Walking: Towards a Valuable Academic Life
Frenetic digital timescapes reduce academic life to the endless achievement of metrics. These forces produce unsustainable work practices that disconnect us from ourselves, from ideas, from the natural world and from each other. While there is a substantial body of literature critiquing this, the use of arts-based inquiry into academic work is less common. In this article, we use slow ‘thinking-in-movement’ practices and arts-based methodologies …
Transcultural and First Nations doctoral education and epistemological border-crossing: Histories and epistemic justice
Existing literature on transcultural doctoral education remains largely silent about how history enters knowledge creation and the supervisory relationship. This paper draws upon Andzaldúa’s borderlands theory and de Sousa Santo’s theory on epistemologies of the South to examine the complex ways that history impacts upon First Nations, migrant, refugee and culturally diverse doctoral candidates’ epistemological border-crossing. We explore how our…
The effects of informal cooperative learning pedagogy on teaching effectiveness, task orientation, and learning satisfaction in undergraduate classrooms in Ethiopia
While cooperative learning (CL) has gained considerable attention in the current discourse about undergraduate quality education, it is minimally used in higher education classrooms, particularly in the developing countries context. Using a non-equivalent control groups design and a sample of undergraduate students (n = 340) from Jimma University, Ethiopia. This study examined the effects of informal CL on teaching effectiveness, task orientation…
Research is…making the emotional dimensions of academics’ research visible
Time mapping: Charting transcultural and First Nations histories and geographies in doctoral education
In this article, we introduce a time mapping methodology to chart the impact of transcultural and First Nations’ histories, geographies and cultural knowledges on doctoral education. Drawing upon a ‘Southern’, postcolonial-decolonial theoretical framing and extending textual life history methodologies, we argue that time mapping is a visual methodology that has the power to disrupt managerial, auditing discourses that have come to dominate presen…
A flight over the study area: Ecological Ontologies in Doctoral Thesis Acknowledgments
Thinking (Now) Out of Place? Scripting and Performing Collective Dissent Inside the Corporatized University
As a response to the corporatization of the university, nine scholars worked together to create spaces that fostered the possibility of collective dissensus. Using scholarly performative methods, we have sought to push back against the increasing corporate incursions into our institutions of higher learning-the over-valuing of money, measures, and metrics which encroach upon our capacity to think. This one-act ethnodrama below is one of our respo…
The timescapes of teaching in Higher Education
The discourses of ‘time’ and ‘change’ have received little interrogation in the field of teaching in higher education and yet both discourses arguably carry profound power in relation to our pedagogical imaginations, practices, experiences and identities. Contemporary higher education is often characterised by a precarious uncertainty, increasingly driven by strong narratives of anticipated futures. Anticipated change in the present and the futur…
Shifting the instructional paradigm in higher education classrooms in Ethiopia: What happens when we use cooperative learning pedagogies more seriously
Community engagement is: Revisiting Boyer’s model of scholarship
Criticisms have been levelled at academics at a time when funding of universities is increasingly tied to private and corporate purposes and when academics are held accountable through a hierarchy of functions. Claims are also made that academics work within narrow specializations and are removed from real-world experience and problems. Boyer’s model of scholarship offers four categories of scholarship that remain relevant to understanding and gu…
(Re)Birthing the Academy: Unruly Daughters Striving for Feminist Futures
In this chapter, the authors argue for the (re)birthing of the academy in ways that would support academic women in their responsibilities for the care of others. They explore how the two institutions of the university and motherhood have been constructed without reference to women/mothers. They then fast forward to the present where women and mothers are present within academe. This sets the scene for four vignettes of the kinds of university th…
Excavating cultural imperialism in student mobility programmes
The New Colombo Plan and similar student mobility initiatives in Aotearoa/New Zealand have been pitched as reversing the culturally imperialist focus of the original Colombo Plan (CP) because they involve sending Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand students to the Indo-Pacific region instead of funding Asian students to study overseas. However, changes in this direction of student mobility mask ongoing geopolitical inequities. In order to interro…
Intercultural doctoral supervision: The centrality of place, time and other forms of knowledge
In order to wrestle effectively with the problems facing our world in the 21st century, we need to draw together the vast array of knowledge systems that all human cultures have produced. This means creating space for Southern, Eastern and Indigenous knowledge in universities and developing more effective forms of intercultural communication. In a recent book, I argued that intercultural doctoral supervision could be a key site for the recognitio…
Time mapping: Charting transcultural and First Nations histories and geographies in doctoral education
In this article, we introduce a time mapping methodology to chart the impact of transcultural and First Nations’ histories, geographies and cultural knowledges on doctoral education. Drawing upon a ‘Southern’, postcolonial-decolonial theoretical framing and extending textual life history methodologies, we argue that time mapping is a visual methodology that has the power to disrupt managerial, auditing discourses that have come to dominate presen…
Evaluating industry-based doctoral research programs: Perspectives and outcomes of Australian Cooperative Research Centre graduates
Researchers of the future will need to be able to work across the increasingly porous boundaries between university, industry, government and community sectors. Concerns have been raised internationally for several decades about the content and approaches adopted in doctoral programs. Innovative doctoral programs that facilitate students' experiences of industry-based research have been introduced around the globe as one approach to addressing th…
Research as an intercultural 'contact zone
Contemporary researchers need to work across many cultural boundaries between ethnicities, between disciplines, between universities and industry, between professional cultures, and between various workplace cultures. While many authors have sought to characterise aspects of this boundary work, there remains little research on how researchers, especially research higher degree students, might be adequately prepared to work sensitively in these cu…
Listen with your heart: Auto-ethnographic reflection on the Wandiny creative gathering
The Wandiny creative gathering of Indigenous and non-Indigenous poets, artists, Elders, and participants across Australia actively sought to foreground First Nations voices, stories, poetry, art, and ontology. This paper presents the auto-ethnographic reflections from the event organisers, demonstrating that participation in a gathering that honours Eldership and Country is a profoundly personal and spiritual experience. Following a call-and-resp…
Walking: Towards a Valuable Academic Life
Frenetic digital timescapes reduce academic life to the endless achievement of metrics. These forces produce unsustainable work practices that disconnect us from ourselves, from ideas, from the natural world and from each other. While there is a substantial body of literature critiquing this, the use of arts-based inquiry into academic work is less common. In this article, we use slow ‘thinking-in-movement’ practices and arts-based methodologies …
Forgetting culturally diverse equity groups in Australian doctoral policy: What Happens When Population Parity Is Reached
Population parity figures keep governments and universities accountable in ensuring that equity groups have access to higher education. However, what happens once population parity is reached? This paper explores Australian doctoral education policy on culturally and linguistically diverse (transcultural) domestic candidates. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, we suggest that an overwhelming focus on counting avoids addressing vital epistemolo…
Community linguascapes and epistemic linguascapes: Making a case for multilingual doctoral education in Australia
The privileging of academic English in research bypasses important issues regarding multilingualism in doctoral education. In Australia, the current monolingual research paradigm limits the scope and nature of the research evidence that informs policymaking, neglecting the experiences, contributions and needs of the First Nations and migrant communities. This paper reviews the existing rationales for engaging with issues of multilingualism in doc…
Australia's policy discourse of culturally and linguistically diverse teachers
Recruitment of more culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) teachers is considered a strategy to address the current national teacher shortage and increasing community diversity in Australia. However, the success of this strategy is cast into uncertainty when considering the historical underrepresentation of CALD school leaders and teachers in Australia. We approach this issue through policy analysis and examine two questions: How are CALD t…
Using Chinese and First Nations philosophies about time and history to reimagine transcultural doctoral education
Transcultural doctoral education has become a space to create opportunities for candidates to construct transcultural knowledge from the Global South. Rancière’s ideas about the ignorant schoolmaster and the role of dissensus have created cosmopolitan pedagogies in doctoral education. However, the role of history in transcultural doctoral education remains unexplored and draws principally on Western theorists. This article explores Chinese and Fi…
A flight over the study area: Ecological Ontologies in Doctoral Thesis Acknowledgments
Cultural hybridity and Australian children: Speaking Back to Educational Discourses About Global Citizenship
Fluidity of cultural identity is an enduring inheritance of contemporary globalisation. One of the less-spoken consequences of this shift has been the increased pressures on young people as they navigate the transformation of their cultural identity between the new and the old. For this group, which comprises not only the children of migrants, but those born into families of multiple cultural heritages, the hybridisation of their cultural identit…
Graduate attribute development and employment outcomes: Tracking PhD graduates
The provision of diversified research training is regarded as one of the most significant contributions made by the Australian Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) programme [Howard Partners 2003 Howard Partners. 2003. Evaluation of the cooperative research centres programme, Canberra, ACT: Department of Education, Science and Training. [Google Scholar], Evaluation of the cooperative research centres programme, Department of Education, Science and …
Research as an intercultural 'contact zone
Contemporary researchers need to work across many cultural boundaries between ethnicities, between disciplines, between universities and industry, between professional cultures, and between various workplace cultures. While many authors have sought to characterise aspects of this boundary work, there remains little research on how researchers, especially research higher degree students, might be adequately prepared to work sensitively in these cu…
Students’ experiences of supervision in academic and industry settings: Results of an Australian study
The joint supervision of Research Higher Degree (RHD) students by an industry and university supervisor is likely to increase in forthcoming years with a rise in the number of university–industry collaborations. Research students may become involved in these collaborative arrangements for a variety of reasons and may launch into their RHD without considering how they will serve two masters, and how this complex relationship will affect their RHD …
Evaluating industry-based doctoral research programs: Perspectives and outcomes of Australian Cooperative Research Centre graduates
Researchers of the future will need to be able to work across the increasingly porous boundaries between university, industry, government and community sectors. Concerns have been raised internationally for several decades about the content and approaches adopted in doctoral programs. Innovative doctoral programs that facilitate students' experiences of industry-based research have been introduced around the globe as one approach to addressing th…
Enhancing professional writing skills of veterinary technology students: Linking assessment and clinical practice in a communications course
Veterinary technology is an emerging profession within the veterinary and allied animal health fields in Australia and affords graduates the opportunity to contribute to the small but growing body of literature within this discipline. This study describes the introduction of a contextualised assessment task to develop students’ research capability, competence and confidence in professional writing, and to engage them with the academic publishing …
Intercultural doctoral supervision: The centrality of place, time and other forms of knowledge
In order to wrestle effectively with the problems facing our world in the 21st century, we need to draw together the vast array of knowledge systems that all human cultures have produced. This means creating space for Southern, Eastern and Indigenous knowledge in universities and developing more effective forms of intercultural communication. In a recent book, I argued that intercultural doctoral supervision could be a key site for the recognitio…
Excavating cultural imperialism in student mobility programmes
The New Colombo Plan and similar student mobility initiatives in Aotearoa/New Zealand have been pitched as reversing the culturally imperialist focus of the original Colombo Plan (CP) because they involve sending Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand students to the Indo-Pacific region instead of funding Asian students to study overseas. However, changes in this direction of student mobility mask ongoing geopolitical inequities. In order to interro…
The timescapes of teaching in Higher Education
The discourses of ‘time’ and ‘change’ have received little interrogation in the field of teaching in higher education and yet both discourses arguably carry profound power in relation to our pedagogical imaginations, practices, experiences and identities. Contemporary higher education is often characterised by a precarious uncertainty, increasingly driven by strong narratives of anticipated futures. Anticipated change in the present and the futur…
Shifting the instructional paradigm in higher education classrooms in Ethiopia: What happens when we use cooperative learning pedagogies more seriously
Community engagement is: Revisiting Boyer’s model of scholarship
Criticisms have been levelled at academics at a time when funding of universities is increasingly tied to private and corporate purposes and when academics are held accountable through a hierarchy of functions. Claims are also made that academics work within narrow specializations and are removed from real-world experience and problems. Boyer’s model of scholarship offers four categories of scholarship that remain relevant to understanding and gu…
(Re)Birthing the Academy: Unruly Daughters Striving for Feminist Futures
In this chapter, the authors argue for the (re)birthing of the academy in ways that would support academic women in their responsibilities for the care of others. They explore how the two institutions of the university and motherhood have been constructed without reference to women/mothers. They then fast forward to the present where women and mothers are present within academe. This sets the scene for four vignettes of the kinds of university th…
Cultural hybridity and Australian children: Speaking Back to Educational Discourses About Global Citizenship
Fluidity of cultural identity is an enduring inheritance of contemporary globalisation. One of the less-spoken consequences of this shift has been the increased pressures on young people as they navigate the transformation of their cultural identity between the new and the old. For this group, which comprises not only the children of migrants, but those born into families of multiple cultural heritages, the hybridisation of their cultural identit…
Transcultural and First Nations doctoral education and epistemological border-crossing: Histories and epistemic justice
Existing literature on transcultural doctoral education remains largely silent about how history enters knowledge creation and the supervisory relationship. This paper draws upon Andzaldúa’s borderlands theory and de Sousa Santo’s theory on epistemologies of the South to examine the complex ways that history impacts upon First Nations, migrant, refugee and culturally diverse doctoral candidates’ epistemological border-crossing. We explore how our…
The effects of informal cooperative learning pedagogy on teaching effectiveness, task orientation, and learning satisfaction in undergraduate classrooms in Ethiopia
While cooperative learning (CL) has gained considerable attention in the current discourse about undergraduate quality education, it is minimally used in higher education classrooms, particularly in the developing countries context. Using a non-equivalent control groups design and a sample of undergraduate students (n = 340) from Jimma University, Ethiopia. This study examined the effects of informal CL on teaching effectiveness, task orientation…
Research is…making the emotional dimensions of academics’ research visible
Time mapping: Charting transcultural and First Nations histories and geographies in doctoral education
In this article, we introduce a time mapping methodology to chart the impact of transcultural and First Nations’ histories, geographies and cultural knowledges on doctoral education. Drawing upon a ‘Southern’, postcolonial-decolonial theoretical framing and extending textual life history methodologies, we argue that time mapping is a visual methodology that has the power to disrupt managerial, auditing discourses that have come to dominate presen…
A flight over the study area: Ecological Ontologies in Doctoral Thesis Acknowledgments
Thinking (Now) Out of Place? Scripting and Performing Collective Dissent Inside the Corporatized University
As a response to the corporatization of the university, nine scholars worked together to create spaces that fostered the possibility of collective dissensus. Using scholarly performative methods, we have sought to push back against the increasing corporate incursions into our institutions of higher learning-the over-valuing of money, measures, and metrics which encroach upon our capacity to think. This one-act ethnodrama below is one of our respo…
Collective, Vulnerable, Nascent (Post) Qualitative Inquiry-Writing
As a group of multidisciplinary postgraduate research students and teachers emerging as a “we,” we read, discussed, and then, without planning to do so, responded in writing to the textual provocations of three post qualitative texts. We picture ourselves as a “classing,” a “becoming class” (Meirieu, 2020, para. 1.). We are a study-group-thinking-writing experimentation; vulnerable, wobbling and joyously grappling to (re)shape (our) post qualitat…
Walking: Towards a Valuable Academic Life
Frenetic digital timescapes reduce academic life to the endless achievement of metrics. These forces produce unsustainable work practices that disconnect us from ourselves, from ideas, from the natural world and from each other. While there is a substantial body of literature critiquing this, the use of arts-based inquiry into academic work is less common. In this article, we use slow ‘thinking-in-movement’ practices and arts-based methodologies …
Walking/Writing, Sensing Side-By-Side: A Decolonial Inquiry
‘Histories of knowledges’ for research education
The world faces complex and entangled environmental, health and social problems that can only be effectively grappled with if the research sector harnesses the knowledges and understandings of diverse cultures. Research education is a key site where more democratic and equitable processes of knowledge creation can take place. Drawing on de Sousa Santos’ argument for epistemic justice, this article discusses research education as embedded in globa…
Using Chinese and First Nations philosophies about time and history to reimagine transcultural doctoral education
Transcultural doctoral education has become a space to create opportunities for candidates to construct transcultural knowledge from the Global South. Rancière’s ideas about the ignorant schoolmaster and the role of dissensus have created cosmopolitan pedagogies in doctoral education. However, the role of history in transcultural doctoral education remains unexplored and draws principally on Western theorists. This article explores Chinese and Fi…
Listen with your heart: Auto-ethnographic reflection on the Wandiny creative gathering
The Wandiny creative gathering of Indigenous and non-Indigenous poets, artists, Elders, and participants across Australia actively sought to foreground First Nations voices, stories, poetry, art, and ontology. This paper presents the auto-ethnographic reflections from the event organisers, demonstrating that participation in a gathering that honours Eldership and Country is a profoundly personal and spiritual experience. Following a call-and-resp…
Structural Power Dynamics in Polycentric Water Governance Networks
Water security is severely threatened by climate change. Building resilient catchments is key to reduce water insecurity, yet power dynamics that generate ineffective governance responses can hinder such resilience building. This research uses an Australian water governance process to study the power dynamics that underpin polycentric governance networks. Combining network theory and Lukes' structural power concept is a novel methodology tested f…
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (17 works) · Pedagogy (15 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Higher Education Practises and Engagement (8 works) · Art (6 works) · Doctoral Education Challenges and Solutions (6 works) · Engineering (6 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works)